


When You Turn the Lamp Down Low

by sevensyllables



Series: It Wouldn't Be Make Believe If You Believed In Me [3]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Drinking, Established Relationship, Fallout Kink Meme, Fluff, M/M, background Cass/Boone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-13
Updated: 2015-11-13
Packaged: 2018-05-01 12:13:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5205506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevensyllables/pseuds/sevensyllables
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Courier takes Arcade’s quip about someone “scooping him off his feet” literally, to mixed results.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When You Turn the Lamp Down Low

“ _What_?” Veronica said, voice squeaking a bit on the final consonant. “What are you on right now? Even _I_ know he’s attractive. Right?” She brandished her half-empty beer bottle toward the others.

Raul, Boone, Cass, the Courier, and Arcade were sprawled out on a vague horseshoe of couches and armchairs in the cocktail lounge of the Lucky 38. Several hours and many drinks ago Lily had chided them all not to stay up too late, but as outside the windows the Mojave sunset inevitably gave way to the neon lights of the Strip, none of them could be bothered to move from their spots.

Boone shrugged minutely, one arm resting along the back of the couch behind Cass, and nodded, saying, “Not bad,” while Cass raised her own bottle of whiskey in assent.

Raul said, “Eh, for a human, sure.”

The Courier still pulled a face. Arcade paused with his beer bottle at his lip, noting his obvious discomfort curiously. The Courier was typically far from reticent when it came to discussing matters of sex.

“Arcade, come on,” Veronica prodded, leaning forward, tucking one leg under the other on her armchair. “Colonel Hsu?”

“He does alright, I’ll admit,” Arcade shrugged against the Courier’s arm around his shoulders. “But who can resist a man in uniform?”

The Courier stared at Arcade like he was a brahmin with six heads. “Me,” he said incredulously.

“And why is that, exactly?” Arcade leaned closer, pressing himself against the Courier’s side, beer bottle tipping precariously where it was lodged in between his knees.

The Courier shook his head at Arcade’s inquisitive face, a hint of an amused smile playing on his lips. “Look,” the Courier said to the room at large. “I have a pretty strict no-NCR policy going on. Always have, always will. My dad was NCR, just a guy passing through town. But, knowing other soldiers, soldiering tends to run in the family.” He took a swig of his beer. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the occasional surprise in the sack. But discovering mid-coitus that you’re fucking your brother wouldn’t really do it for me.”

Arcade choked on the sip of beer he had been taking and Cass threw her head back and howled in laughter. She nearly dropped her bottle of whiskey to the brightly patterned floor, tucking her face against Boone’s shoulder while he chuckled into his beer. Raul rattled off something in Spanish that made the Courier bark a laugh of his own.

“Okay, okay, that’s _completely_ fair,” Veronica agreed, still giggling, sucking on her hand where she had spilled some of her beer.

“Yeah, no kiddin’,” the Courier drawled. “So, sorry, Boone,” he tipped his beer in a salute. “I know you had your heart dead set on taking a ride, but me and you weren’t meant to be.”

Boone snorted. “Damn. And I had such a great plan to steal you away from the doc. Had the flowers picked out and everything.”

“Wait now, you didn’t tell me there’d be flowers,” the Courier teased, leaning forward and patting Arcade on the knee.

“Sorry, doc,” Boone smirked from the other couch.

“Eh,” Arcade said with a shrug. “He’s all talk. When the time comes all he’ll see is the two-headed bear staring him in the face. I, on the other hand, have no such reservations when it comes to soldiers.”

“Oh, well with an offer like that, I have to go for it,” Boone said. Cass snorted into her whiskey, and he shifted incrementally closer to her.

“Hey, old man,” Cass said loudly, pointing the lip of her bottle at Raul. “You’ve been around for ages. You’ve got to have a few good stories about getting someone to loosen up their shiny brass buttons.”

Raul leaned back expansively, as if the armchair he sat in were a throne. “Sure now, let’s see,” he began, smoothing down his moustache with a flourish.

The Courier chose this shift in conversation to lean in toward Arcade on the couch they shared. Arcade glanced at him sideways, taking another pull of his beer.

The Courier drew in close, dropping his arm from Arcade’s shoulders to the middle of his back, voice low and grin bright, “Were you tryin’ to make me jealous, Doc?”

Arcade turned to him, eyebrows sky-high and a matching grin on his face. “No,” he murmured back. “Why, are you?”

“No,” the Courier said with a soft chuckle, knocking his knee against Arcade’s.

“Then it’s a good thing I wasn’t trying to make you jealous.”

“Like you would really fuck Boone,” the Courier said, the twist of his hand around the neck of his beer bottle too obscene to be mere coincidence.

Arcade made a show of thinking about it, glancing over to where Boone drank from his beer. Cass’ thigh was pressed against his. “I don’t know,” Arcade said slowly, waving his own bottle around. “I’m sure he has plenty of great qualities.”

The Courier huffed a laugh and downed his beer, setting the empty bottle on the floor next to the couch. “Yeah, okay.”

It was Arcade’s turn to lean in closer to the Courier. He rested a hand above his knee. “Are you _trying_ to be jealous?”

“Doc,” the Courier said, voice a low rumble. “The only thing I’m trying to do is find a way into your bed tonight.”

“Hmm,” Arcade said, as if he and the Courier hadn’t slept together every night in recent memory that had featured a bed, and even a few that hadn’t. “Well, as it looks like Boone is going to have someone else joining him in _his_ , I suppose you’re my only offer.”

“Yeah,” the Courier chuckled softly, his eyes flicking to the other couch. “I noticed that too.”

“Is that new?” He glanced back at Boone and Cass; she had her hand on his thigh now, the slight flush on his neck the only indication he was distracted from Raul’s story at all.

“Must be,” the Courier answered with a shrug. He dipped his head closer to Arcade’s as if he were going in for a kiss, then plucked Arcade’s mostly empty beer from his hands.

Arcade gave a shocked laugh as the Courier took a sip. “Either way,” the Courier smirked around the bottle. “I’m glad that I fall above Raul on your short list ‘a options.”

“Oh, well hold on,” Arcade said, reaching for the bottle. “You didn’t tell me that Raul was a possibility—”

“ _Oh_ -kay,” Veronica said loudly, rising from her armchair on shaky legs. “There is altogether too much whispering happening in that corner for me to feel comfortable that all articles of clothing are going to remain _on_ in the near future.”

“Please,” the Courier scoffed, leaning against the couch, stretching his arms across the back and letting one knee knock against Arcade’s again. He had switched Arcade’s beer bottle to his other hand; he would have to crawl over the Courier if he wanted to retrieve it. “You’d love the show.”

Veronica grimaced melodramatically, like she’d trod through bighorner dung, throwing in a couple of fake gagging noises for good measure.

Cass snorted, downing the last of her whiskey. “Well, on that note.” She stood, clapped a hand against Boone’s knee and said, “Goodnight, y’all.”

Boone stood and followed her with a nod and a mumbled ‘goodnight,’ trading mock punches with Veronica on the way to the elevator. Raul rose from his chair and stretched sluggishly, knees popping. He gathered up Veronica and Boone’s abandoned bottles from the low table to place on the circular bar with the rest of the empties. “We still on for Nellis tomorrow, _jefe_?”

“You got it, _jefe_ ,” the Courier agreed easily, raising the beer bottle in a salute as Raul clapped the Courier on the shoulder and waved a goodnight to Arcade.

The Courier finished the last of Arcade’s beer as the elevator doors clicked shut.

Arcade leaned forward into his space, toying with the hem of the Courier’s t-shirt. “Tell me you weren’t actually jealous.”

The Courier ran a hand up Arcade’s thigh, warm breath ghosting against his cheek. “Of Boone?”

“Of anyone,” Arcade said, skimming his hands over his shoulders while the Courier nosed at his neck.

The Courier leaned back to look Arcade in the eye, grin slightly dopey with the lateness of the hour and the alcohol he’d consumed. “Nah,” he said after a moment, eyes twinkling fondly. “Not worried about you, Doc.”

Arcade chuckled and kissed him warmly, sinking his hands into the Courier’s hair. The Courier pressed him into the couch, sliding a hand up Arcade’s back under his shirt. Arcade’s head was pleasantly dizzy, from the beer, from the feel of the Courier flush against his front. When they broke apart for a breath the Courier bonked his forehead against Arcade’s affectionately, one hand stroking his collarbone.

They had had a good evening, all of them—a good stretch of days, in fact, where disputes had been settled with persuasion or caps rather than lead and plasma. Tonight’s festivities, low-key though they were, had been a welcome change from their group’s usual endless wandering, endless death. It was nice to see the Courier this relaxed, boneless and grinning on the couch, and the feeling settled in Arcade’s chest, combining with the alcohol to make him a bit giddy.

He brushed a stray hair from the Courier’s face and grinned up at him, teasing. “Everywhere you’ve been in the NCR and the Mojave and you’ve really never slept with a soldier?”

“Fuck no,” he said, mouthing at Arcade’s throat. He pulled up quickly, disbelief and glee warring on his face. “Why? Have you?”

Arcade’s only response was a quirk of his lips. He tried to reel the Courier in for another kiss, one hand snaking under his shirt as a distraction, but the Courier just danced out of reach with a delighted laugh.

“You’re kiddin’ me. Dr. ‘I-Simply-Disagree-With-the-NCR’s-Aims-on-a-Fundamental-Ideological-Level’?”

Arcade squeezed at the Courier’s side; this was a moment when he wished the other man were ticklish. “Why is it that you only seem to listen to me in order to quote myself back to me when it suits you?” He tripped over his phrasing, but the Courier took his meaning nonetheless.

“Nah, I listen to you all the time, Doc.” He pressed a kiss to Arcade’s jaw. “But you’re dodging the question.”

When the Courier raised his eyebrows expectantly, Arcade chuckled. “I am,” he admitted. “There’s a joke here about proficiency in handling military issue weapons and triggers, I just need to find it.”

The Courier groaned fondly, pressing his stubbled jaw against Arcade’s neck.

“There’s nothing to tell, really,” Arcade shrugged as the Courier sucked a kiss into the skin below his ear. “He was just a soldier who needed to have a dislocated shoulder reset.”

“Wait,” the Courier said, sitting up, his face contorted in mock outrage. “He was a patient ‘a yours? _Now_ I’m jealous. I thought what we had was special, Doc.”

His pronounced frown the picture of playfulness, but Arcade’s stomach still swooped at his joking suggestion.

“Don’t worry,” Arcade said, keeping his own tone light, running his palms up and down the Courier’s jean-clad thighs. “You still far outrank all other challengers in the ratio of injuries tended to orgasms achieved.”

The Courier chuckled deeply into their next kiss, sliding his hands down between the couch and Arcade’s lower back. Arcade arched into the touch; he could feel the Courier’s heart thumping where their chests were pressed together. “And how d’you feel about skewing that ratio a little further in one direction tonight?”

“Like we said before,” Arcade murmured, combing a hand through the Courier’s hair. “Boone’s already busy and Raul went to bed, so I suppose you’re the only game in town. Unless I felt like dropping by Gomorrah, of course.”

The Courier’s only reply was to kiss Arcade through his grin and grind against him on the couch. Their hips connected, friction not enough through two layers of clothes, but Arcade was too warm and content to get worked up about it just yet. The Courier let him roll them over, splay his hands across the Courier’s chest while he cupped Arcade’s face in his hands and kissed him soundly.

When the Courier started to undo the buttons on Arcade’s shirt he stopped him with a press of his hand. “Bed?” Arcade said.

“Bed,” the Courier agreed. He lumbered quickly to his feet, then turned to push at Arcade’s knees, not letting him up from the couch.

“What are you doing?” Arcade asked with an amused frown.

“Quotin’ you back to yourself to suit _you_ ,” the Courier said, bending over the couch to slip one arm behind Arcade’s shoulders and the other under his thighs. “Didn’t you once tell me you were waiting for some lucky man to scoop you off your feet?”

Arcade looked at him blankly for a moment, then laughed in dismay. The Courier might be notably stronger than he was, but Arcade had more than a couple inches on him, and had been joking when he had said that anyway, self-deprecating. “No, what I said was—” but he was cut off when the Courier hefted him off the couch.

The Courier stood there, wobbling minutely for the span of several heartbeats, until they could both be sure he had his feet properly under him. His smirk said nothing if not ‘I told you so,’ which Arcade could not let go unanswered. He had just opened his mouth to retort, arms around the Courier’s shoulders, when the Courier took a half-step backwards, socked foot finding the overturned beer bottle he had set on the floor earlier.

They crashed to the floor in a heap, Arcade catching himself on the couch on the way down so as not to land on top of the Courier completely. Thankfully, they both missed the sharp corners of the nearby coffee table, and the bottle had skittered away across the carpet rather than shattering beneath them.

They lay there for a silent moment, stunned in that way only the inebriated could be. “Ow, fuck,” the Courier finally groaned, and they dissolved into rough laughter. It wouldn’t have been half as funny had they both been sober, but as they weren’t permanently injured, neither of them had it in them to truly complain.

“Are you alright?” Arcade asked eventually, untangling their legs. “Anything hurt?”

“Only my dignity and my ass,” the Courier responded, rubbing at his lower back.

Arcade chuckled and he shifted over to kiss him. “I hate to be the one to tell you this, but your dignity was a lost cause long ago.”

The Courier kissed him back, then winced when he moved to lean into Arcade’s space. He twisted his torso experimentally, lifted his hips with a pronounced grimace. “Ow,” he repeated. “Tomorrow we’re telling everyone I got hurt having really athletic sex.”

Arcade snorted and stood up, seemingly no worse for wear than a pair of bruised elbows. At least the lounge floor was carpeted. He extended a hand to help the Courier up. “When you said you wanted to skew that ratio a little further…”

“Yeah,” the Courier said with another wince. He stretched his back gingerly, looking suddenly exhausted. Whatever arousal they had managed to drum up through their alcoholic and sleepy haze had slipped away, just like the beer bottle across the carpeted floor. “Not exactly what I had in mind.”

“Come on,” Arcade said softly. “Bed.”

“Bed,” the Courier repeated, much less excitedly this time.

The Courier leaned on Arcade in the elevator, one arm slung around his hips, the other hand picking drowsily at the buttons on his shirtfront. Arcade pressed an absentminded kiss to his temple, the left one with the scar, and failed to fully suppress a yawn. They both probably should have crowded into the elevator with the others earlier, especially given that they had a long day of diplomacy and/or battle on the horizon.

He wondered vaguely how the sleeping arrangements downstairs had shaken out, with Cass and Boone having seemed intent and there being a very finite number of walls to put between them and everyone else. Veronica had once suggested that the Courier break into one of the other unused levels of the tower for privacy when she had walked in on them in the bathroom; it had been nothing too compromising, just a matching set of suggestive grins and the Courier’s shirtlessness to give anything away. Maybe Cass and Boone had done just that and were on another floor, and after he saw the Courier off to bed in the master suite he could make it safely to his own underutilized bed in the guest rooms.

The elevator doors shuttered open on a blessedly silent presidential suite, only Victor in sight.

The Courier shuffled over to his own door, looking back curiously when Arcade wasn’t right there with him.

Arcade smiled at the sight, and stepped forward to press a goodnight kiss to his lips, like a couple of Pre-War lovers after a night out. “Don’t forget about Nellis tomorrow morning.”

The Courier frowned, latching one hand onto Arcade’s hip. “I haven’t,” he said, tone a little more defensive than Arcade felt warranted.

“Okay,” Arcade merely shrugged, one placating hand coming to rest on the Courier’s side. He hadn’t meant anything by it; clearly they both needed what rest they could get.

“Aren’t you coming?” the Courier’s frown deepened, one hand on the doorknob.

Arcade hesitated, eyes flicking to the Courier’s bed, Rex curled up on the floor at the foot of it, dreaming of biomechanical sheep, probably.

When they were on the Strip they didn’t do this, literally sleeping together without having first done so figuratively. They’d huddled together plenty of times out in the Mojave, under the stars with Veronica just a sleeping bag over or jammed together on stained mattresses in tiny shacks without having had sex prior to falling asleep, but it got cold out in the Wastes. The same could not be said for the Lucky 38. Arcade searched the Courier’s impatient face, wondered if he had meant something a little more by his teasing recollection of Arcade’s quip about a lucky man sweeping him off his feet after all.

The Courier sighed, but his face softened. He bumped his forehead against Arcade’s gently. “Come on, sleep. You think too much, Doc.”

“That’s what they tell me,” Arcade said blithely, but he followed the Courier into the master bedroom nonetheless. As they curled together underneath the sheets, bedside lamps shut off with a click, the Courier shifted to keep pressure off of his bruised tailbone and slung one arm over Arcade’s side. Arcade smiled softly, allowed himself to sink into the casual domesticity of it all.

In the morning, with a trek out to meet the Boomers looming and the slightest tinge of a hangover playing at the corners of his awareness, Arcade awoke to stubble and the feeling of a broadening grin against his neck, and was content to lie there a little while longer.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Ella Fitzgerald’s “Beginning to See the Light.”
> 
> Written for this [prompt](http://falloutkinkmeme.livejournal.com/5459.html?thread=11473235#t11473235) on the Fallout Kink Meme.
> 
> You can find me [here on tumblr.](http://kuznetsovs.tumblr.com)


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